Religion: so awkward, right? One of the most uncomfortable topics that exists, probably, up there with Brexit and the Will Smith slap. The fact that 85% of the human population identify with some kind of faith group doesn’t make it any easier to discuss.
If you have a set of beliefs, however well-meaning and humane, they’re bound to set you on a course of divergence from those who hold alternate ones, or none at all, as our world has found to its repeated and tragic cost. Small wonder that some in the remaining 15% feel outright hostility to the very concept of faith.
It’s this anomaly that the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar tackles in his newly published book How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures. The desire to reach out and feel part of something transcendent, beyond human cognition, can be observed in every culture known to history and Dunbar notes the evolutionary and societal advantages of our religious impulse, while capturing its flipside too. The very thing that creates such positive bonds between humans with shared beliefs is also responsible for the division and conflict they cause.
And yet, says Dunbar, “it is difficult to see any convincing evidence for anything that will replace [religion] in human affairs”. That’s certainly worth pondering at the end of a week that has seen the unusual confluence of three of the world’s major religious holidays: Ramadan, Passover and Easter. Such a convergence only occurs three times a century and results in a rare opportunity for believers to observe the similarities of their rituals and beliefs, as opposed to their differences.
Last week, I was invited to an iftar meal at which a number of the guests spoke of their practices during Ramadan and the inspiration behind them. As a Christian whose approach to the supposed self-denial of Lent has been pretty lackadaisical down the years, it was a challenge as well as an inspiration to witness how the people surrounding me engaged with their own fasting season. It was, too, the first time I’d experienced such resonance with Islam’s daily rhythm of prayer in the church’s Holy Week offerings of morning prayer, lunchtime Eucharist, evensong and compline.
One woman at dinner was asked what her faith meant to her. Everything, she said: it determined how she saw her place in the world, the values she held and the choices she made, the way she conducted her relationships. I recognised not just the response but the ease and enthusiasm with which she spoke. My own faith has waxed, waned and wobbled over the years, but I have known the times when it brings joy and confidence and meaning to life and something in me vibrated with a sympathetic delight.
I’ve also, of course, watched plenty of friends lose their faith, always for the same reasons I could imagine one day losing mine, be it the suffering of others or the disappointments of life or the irrationality of religion. The big one, perhaps, is the impossibility of belief in some unseen being with human interests at heart when the world can be so cruel and unjust.
And a Maundy Thursday encounter with Francis Bacon’s paintings at the Royal Academy was a sharp reminder to me that humans are fleshly creatures with animalistic impulses. The popes and crucifixions that recur so frequently in Bacon’s imagery don’t speak of redemption or eternity but of futility, mortality and horror. Some of the canvases are so confronting that I wondered whether the gallery should run special late-night viewings at which visitors are permitted to howl.
But a different exhibition offered another perspective, one that will stay with me for an equally long time. For anyone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about our prehistoric forebears, the British Museum’s current show about Stonehenge is a revelation. Last summer, on visiting the monument itself, I was confronted by my ignorance of the cultures responsible for it, but the World of Stonehenge is the perfect corrective. It immerses you in the humanity of 5,000 years ago, the people who lived and worked together not just to survive but to increase their knowledge of the universe and to create extraordinary things.
Transporting displays of finds from both Salisbury Plain and all over bronze age Britain helps us see these seemingly remote people as men and women just like us: smart and competent and resourceful and inquisitive. One discovery shows two separate cultures communing with each other, the last of the hunter-gatherers joining the first of the farmers for a remarkable shared feast that couldn’t help but prompt memories of an Oklahoma song: “Oh! The farmer and the cowman should be friends…”
And, yes, humans back then were working out their own power dynamics too, discovering ways to accumulate wealth and prestige, to wield authority. We’re made of the same stuff, with the same needs and wants and drives. Five millennia don’t take you as far as you’d think. We’re still the same human race that has leant on faith and sought the spiritual throughout our entire existence.
That sense of commonality with the past has merged, in my mind, with the communality of the religious rituals that have taken place all over the globe last week. Millions of people have devoted time, thought and self-discipline to honour something outside themselves, to seek a more universal good than their own. In an individualistic age that encourages narcissistic ways of thinking, in a geopolitical climate where leaders serve their own egos, that’s not nothing.
It’s easy to perceive religion as a hangover from our collective, pre-scientific past, to write it off as the thing humans did before we understood the world we lived in. But perhaps today, overloaded with information as we are, its offer is as relevant as ever – a sense of perspective, a turning of focus away from ourselves, a way to make peace with the things we still cannot make sense of or will not see changed in our lifetime. If faith can unify us at all, it is in our mutual humility.
• Emma John’s book, Self Contained: Scenes From a Single Life, is out now
